The Distillation

...this young man first learned of a drug called MDMA, still legal at the time. Little did he realize that this would be the beginning of a lifelong quest to legitimize a drug in the eyes of a world in which it would soon become taboo. This journey would take over 35 years …

Once the remarkable results from the Phase 2 studies began to filter out no one could deny the treatment's incredible potential. The results of various worldwide trials targeted at patients with treatment resistant cases of PTSD showed that 55 percent of subjects were free of symptoms after two MDMA therapy sessions. The numbers increased to 61 percent after three sessions. Even more exciting were the long-term follow up studies showing that, instead of the effect of the treatment waning over time, it actually increased, with some subjects taking longer to exhibit positive responses. Twelve months after treatment a stunning 68 percent of subjects, who were classified as especially extreme and treatment-resistant, were considered free of any PTSD symptoms. This compared to a placebo control displaying an expected success rate of 23 percent. There was no doubt about it, MDMA was proving to be a remarkable PTSD treatment ... After almost 35 years of prohibition, MDMA is soon to be available by prescription, and once this door is open it's not hard to be excited about the possibilities that could come.

The B.C. Centre on Substance Use will conduct the Vancouver trials ...Health Canada gave the green light for the latest round of trials, and discussions are slated to begin in February [2018] over what the department will need to see in order to approve the treatment ... Erika Dyck, a medical historian at the University of Saskatchewan, said a resurgence of interest in exploring the medical usefulness of historically maligned drugs may be linked with the ineffectiveness of current treatments and how desperate society is to find therapies that work.

The B.C. Centre on Substance Use will conduct the Vancouver trials as part of a larger research project overseen by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, a non-profit pharmaceutical company based in California. Talks are also underway for a Montreal facility to participate. "We hope to prove that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is the most effective treatment for PTSD that exists on the planet," said Mark Haden, a public health professor at the University of British Columbia. Haden founded the Canadian wing of MAPS and helped organize stage two of the organization's research trials in Vancouver ... Doblin said the FDA has agreed to approve the therapy if stage three studies show the drug is effective and there are no safety issues.

“...basically saved my life,” said Veysey, 33, who works as a prep cook at a Portland retirement home. “I’m able to get up and go to work every day, and have a life. I don’t look at marijuana as a drug anymore.” ... Marc Colello, 42, of Auburn said he was a patient of Gullikson, and medical marijuana and kratom helped him beat opioid addictions that lasted nearly 20 years. “If you say you’re going to use cannabis for addiction treatment, people are initially like, ‘Ha, ha, yeah right.’ But it’s happening. People are doing this, and it’s working,” said Colello, a self-employed IT contractor. “I have a life, a job, friends and activities. I had no quality of life before.”

Veysey said when he was taking heroin, he was in and out of jail for various drug-related crimes, “homeless and miserable. I didn’t want anyone else around. I was always chasing the drug.” Marijuana is calming and soothing, and helps him stay focused and get through each day, Veysey said. He said he has joined a church and repaired relationships with family members. On March 1, 2018 Gullikson and her husband, Ron Figaratto, are opening Greener Pastures, a controversial residential treatment home in Portland. It will promote cannabis use for long-term treatment for opioid addiction and kratom for withdrawal from the powerful painkillers ... She said she’s not sure how insurance companies are going to reimburse for her services, but they will work with patients. They will try to take Medicaid patients as well, and the plan is to eventually offer two “scholarship” beds where patients do not have to pay. Gullikson said she realizes the out-of-pocket costs are hefty and unaffordable for most. It’s unclear how much of the treatment insurance companies will cover.

I’m a massive advocate for being ridiculously picky about who you join in ceremony ... Sometimes we have to visit the darkest corners of our consciousness to let go of what ails us; if that’s the case, you really want to be with someone who has done the same work on themselves.​

I work both inside and outside of ceremonial circles, and recently I’ve heard a shockingly large number of tales from folks who feel more traumatized since drinking ayahuasca. This is not the fault of the medicine. The accountability lies in the humans who created the brew and led the ceremonies. The level of responsibility it takes to organize, host, and facilitate ayahuasca ceremonies is mind-blowingly deep. Many aren’t up for the challenge and therefore dismiss the necessity to hold this liability. This will inevitably result in some awful ramifications, often shouldered by the unsuspecting souls who sit with novice practitioners ... Whatever you are going through, you are not alone. If you’re in an ayahuasca aftermath feeling worse off than you were originally, get help pronto. This medicine wants to heal and expand you, not harm you. Speed bumps are normal, as Aya is one of the most powerful substances on the planet, but you don’t have to suffer alone. In fact, you don’t have to suffer at all. You will come through this stronger and wiser than ever before; all you need is the motivation and assistance to move the energy and get to the other side.​From the Article: Messed up after ayahuasca ceremony?Published by: Entheo-NationOriginal Link : https://entheonation.com/blog/messed-up-after-ayahuasca/Artwork Fair Use: By Wowbobwow12 at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3374805

LSD and psilocybin are not creations of the sixties. Psilocybin, the chemical in magic mushrooms, has been used in the Americas going back at least a thousand years, and possibly a lot more, as part of religious rituals. It may be that these chemicals are where we developed our religious impulse. Our sense that there is a beyond or another world besides the one right in front of us.

We had a big backlash against LSD in the 1960s. We had a very productive period of research in the fifties and into the sixties and it was showing some really encouraging results. Then there was this powerful backlash, in part because [LSD] had become the counter-culture drug of choice. You had this yawning generation gap, that I think the drugs contributed to. You had all these young people having this powerful experience, almost a rite of passage, that the adults in the society thought was really weird and scary. That exacerbated the sense that these two generations were moving apart. That won’t happen again. The people who are in charge of our institutions are more familiar with psychedelics. Many of them have taken them. I interviewed a past president of the American Psychiatric Association about his use of psychedelics and how it affected his intellectual development. We’re at a different point.​From the Article: Michael Pollan talk farm-to-table food - and LSDPublished by: Austin MonthlyOriginal Link : http://www.austinmonthly.com/Blog/January-2018/Michael-Pollan-Talks-Farm-to-Table-Food-and-LSD/Artwork Fair Use: By Benjah-bmm27 - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1327201

I have concluded that this Second Psychedelic Revolution is instinctively creating modern mystery schools, and that these movable temples of music, dance, and art are the closest things our society has to true portals to transcendence.

For most people, the more of these festivals you attend, the more this sense of community grows, along with the ability and desire to collaborate with like-minded groups and individuals ... The community involved in the production of these festivals worldwide—producers and artists, stage builders and designers, structural engineers, sound engineers, lighting and video engineers, wood and welding wizards, as well as the traveling circus of musicians, DJs, producers and performers, and another whole community of vendors, many of whom now travel with their young children—has grown so large in the past fifteen years that there is now a significant move away from the festival model ... Many of the people involved are beginning to feel that these events are becoming too large and wasteful, in view of the amount of time and resources that are spent constructing these elaborate psychedelic environments, only to have to break them down again days later ... The natural progression is toward the purchase of permanent sites for these events (such as BOOM! in Portugal) ... If there is a substantial difference between the outsider attitude of the psychedelic politics of Timothy Leary’s era—immortalized by his unfortunate advice to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out’” in 1966—and the pragmatic politics on display at tech-savvy festivals like BOOM!, Lightning in a Bottle, and Symbiosis, or within a professional psychedelic organization like MAPS or the Heffter Research Institute, it is in the recognition that slow change is more likely to occur within the system than as any kind of overwhelming revolution. While a transpersonal experience with psychedelics can motivate an individual to work toward real personal and social change—a psychedelic form of liberation theology—the mere act of taking the psychedelic itself generally changes nothing.​From the Article: Building a Modern EleusisPublished by: Reality SandwichOriginal Link : http://realitysandwich.com/322591/building-a-modern-eleusis/Artwork Fair Use: By Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany - Eleusis, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37877986

Tyo said one of the roles of the Psychedelic Society isn’t necessarily promoting psychedelic... use, but if someone is using it urges people to do it in a safe and informed way. -Richard Tyo, a registered psychotherapist and member of the Kingston Psychedelic Society,

In the hope of spreading awareness of the therapeutic benefits of MDMA [sassafras] ... one local psychotherapist is encouraging Kingstonians to explore and discuss the opportunities of psychedelic drugs. Tyo said he is hyperaware of the various opinions on the use of drugs. He said the society is a well-informed group interested in the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelic substances. “It’s different researchers in town, I work in front-line mental health, It’s different social workers, it’s university students, it’s artists,” Tyo said. “It’s a variety of different people that are very intrigued by these substances, because they do a lot of things in therapy that we can’t do in normal therapy because there are so many blocks that people have.”​From the Article: Group urges safe use of psychedelic substancesPublished by: The WhigOriginal Link : http://www.thewhig.com/2018/01/24/group-urges-safe-use-of-psychedelic-substancesArtwork Fair Use: By Smith, James Edward, Sir, 1759-1828 (text), Abbot, John, 1751-1840 (artist) - The natural history of the rarer lepidopterous insects of Georgia, volume 1, Tab 2 (modified from Biodiversity Heritage Library), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6427952

Despite being early in the festival season the amount of MDMA - or E - tested by Know Your Stuff (in New Zealand) that was indeed MDMA was higher than ever before, the group's director Wendy Allison said. Most pills ranged between 80 and 120 milligrams of MDMA but at one festival a person - who said they got the drugs from Amsterdam - had a single dose with an estimated 580mlg of the active ingredient. That was easily the most-potent E find of the summer so far, but pills were often turning up two-times their normal dose, she said. ​"It tested to be mostly MDMA - we couldn't find anything else in it." While MDMA was generally not fatal, users could overdose through "serotonin syndrome" where the body lost the ability to regulate heat. There have been three known ecstasy-related deaths in New Zealand, the first of which is thought to have been linked to the phenomenon, New Zealand Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell said . The only way people could get specific information on black market drugs was with checking. If the public and authorities really wanted to know what types of drugs people were taking and issue good warnings then the law needed to catch up, he said. Many festival organisers - despite wanting the service - were still too nervous about their liability and Bell said both festivals and drug-testers needed greater legal protection. The Misuse of Drugs Act makes it illegal for festival organisers to knowingly allow recreational drugs on their premises. "If you want to get 100 per cent information about what's on the black market then test the drugs people are putting in their mouths." The information could also help authorities such as police avoid embarrassing public announcements, Bell said.From the Article: Summer of love tinged with danger as MDMA reaches new peaks at New Zealand festivalsPublished by: Stuff.co.nzOriginal Link : https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/100321038/summer-of-love-tinged-with-danger-as-mdma-reaches-new-peaks-at-nz-festivalsArtwork Fair Use: By Melirius [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Opponents of cannabis reform always claim that legalization will increase teen use of marijuana, but statistics from canna-legal states are increasingly proving that the exact opposite is true. Despite the [current] administration's constant anti-cannabis rhetoric, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) has confirmed that teen marijuana use has dropped in almost every state that has legalized recreational cannabis.

The most significant drop in teen use was reported in Colorado, where the rate of past-month pot use by individuals aged 12-17 fell almost 20%, from 11.13% in 2014-15 to 9.08% in 2015-16, the survey reports. The survey also confirms that Colorado teens are using less marijuana than they did before legalization. In the 2012-13 survey period, before the start of legal adult recreational sales in 2014, 11.16% of teens reported using pot. Washington State also saw a similar drop in teen pot use, the survey found. The rate of past-month cannabis use among 12-17 year olds fell from 9.17% in 2014-15 to 7.93% in 2015-16. These current rates are also lower than they were before the state legalized recreational use in 2012 — 9.45% of teens used pot in 2011-12 and 9.81% in 2012-13. Oregon and Washington D.C. also saw decreases in teen pot use, albeit smaller ones.

“Fighting drugs without legalizing them is like fighting tooth decay without removing the cavity. UN drug prohibition and criminalization, indelibly written into the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, is the cavity. Drill it clean during the March 2018 CND Session.”

Europe, Asia, Indonesia, Africa, Australia, and North, South and Central America, everywhere in the world, an assortment of drug-prohibition problems screamed for relief at the door of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, from April 19-21, 2016, at its special session regarding drug policy. Though billed as a special session regarding “the world drug problem,” in reality, the session concerned the world drug POLICY problem, because the same United Nations drug treaties that devastated Mexico, Central and South America also struck hard at the basic health, safety and welfare of mankind in the United States and around the world. The oldest and most pernicious of UN drug conventions is the 1961 Single Commission on Narcotic Drugs. This treaty proclaims that the only legal use of roughly 119 mind-altering substances scheduled therein is for medical and scientific purpose, and mandates national legislative and administrative action to criminalize any deviation therefrom. The drugs listed in the onerous Schedule 1 are said to have no medicinal value and a high potential for abuse. The Schedule 1 list includes both heroin and cannabis, patently, a senseless, uninformed and arbitrary classification, having no medicinal credibility and a high potential for mischief and law-enforcement abuse. ​World leaders assembled at [2016] UNGASS should have called for an end to drug prohibition and an to the World War on Drugs. They should have called for the amendment, or complete repeal, of UN drug conventions. They should have discarded their intolerant and myopic view of the proper purpose of drug use and accepted the reality that people of the world predominantly use drugs for rest, relaxation and recreation (RRR) ... Next stop #UNGASS2019. Let us, now, all bow our heads in hope and prayer that 2019 will be as unlike 2016 as night and day, as war and peace, as intolerance and tolerance, as evil and good.

ECfES

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